Carrie Underwood’s ‘Cry Pretty’ Album Lands at No. 1, Breaks Records

Carrie Underwood's new Cry Pretty album debuts as the No. 1 all-genre release this week and is the biggest country debut in more than three years.

The "Love Wins" singer notched 266,000 equivalent albums (including streams) to top the Billboard 200 album chart. It's the best week for a female artist of any genre in 2018 and the best selling country album since Luke Bryan's Kill the Lights racked up 345K in equivalent albums in August 2015. The equivalent album began being used as a metric in 2014. Before that, numbers were based on traditional sales (digital and physical). Cry Pretty sold 251,000 copies in traditional sales.

In landing Cry Pretty at No. 1, Underwood becomes the first woman to put four country albums at the top of the all-genre Billboard Top 200 chart — her Blown Away, Play On and Carnival Ride albums all earned the No. 1 spot upon release. The total first week sales are comparable to both Blown Away and Play On (from 2012 and 2009, respectively) but Carnival Ride, her second album after winning American Idol, landed with 527K first week sales in 2007. For posterity, Some Hearts (2005) sold 315K thousand copies in the first week and Storyteller sold 177K.